Importance of skilled immigrants

Cities, states and nations now compete in a global talent pool — where high-skilled workers help create and attract employment opportunities. If the United States is going to create new jobs, and succeed competitively, we need to adapt to this rapidly changing global economy.

An important part of this effort is likely to turn on our ability to develop smart policies that ensure we nurture our own talent, and also attract the international, skilled workforce needed to ensure that the U.S. economy thrives.

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Yet today the United States faces a skills gap in our economy. Investments in education are critical to addressing this. But so, too, is thoughtful reform of U.S. immigration laws.

Enhancing our country’s workforce depends on targeted efforts to attract relatively small numbers of the most skilled people from around the globe to come here.

A strategic high-skilled immigration policy does not mean a zero-sum competition for jobs against U.S. citizens. To the contrary, high-skilled immigration can help create more jobs here for both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals alike.

Our current immigration laws, however, don’t support this job creation goal. We face shortages of skilled workers in key sectors of our economy.

For example, in May, Microsoft had 4,551 unfilled job openings in the U.S. — 2,629 in computer science and engineering. Filling these critical positions cannot be done — and certainly not in the near term — exclusively through educational improvements in the United States. Meanwhile, per-country caps on employment-based green cards threaten to make it more difficult to fill these jobs with talent from overseas.

In addition, restrictions in student visa programs push many of our universities’ brightest foreign graduates to go work in other nations. Sixty percent of computer science Ph.D. graduates from U.S. universities last year were foreign nationals, many of whom faced restrictions on their ability to work in this country.